Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida Opening at Film Forum in New York on May 2, 2014

In Ida, filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski uses the story of a young novice in a convent who discovers her own past as a hidden Jewish child to explore not only the Holocaust, but also postwar Poland under Communism.

“Ida may not end on exactly the note some viewers might wish, hoping, no doubt, for a denouement where each of the three main characters finds personal peace. And yet, for all that, Pawlikowski and his co-screenwriter, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, have engaged with both the dark history of the Holocaust and the grim period of the Iron Curtain to give us something that holds you totally in its grip and offers something like hope.”
—Allen Ellenzweig, Forward

“Ida is thus a kind of investigatory road film in which, driving through rural Poland, the cloistered novice learns more about life’s cruelties and her country’s recent past than she would surely ever want to know—while her aunt, whose belief in her own secular faith has long since eroded, is forced to re-experience the trauma she would prefer had remained buried.”
—J. Hoberman, Tablet

Watch a trailer.

Read reviews of Ida:
J. Hoberman (Tablet)
Allen Ellenzweig (Forward)

Read excerpts from an interview by Masha Leon with the filmmaker in The Forward.